Peace Corps writers

Several years back, author/editor Jon Thiem mentioned to a young woman (with a Ph.D.) that in the late 1960s he had served in the Peace Corps in Ghana, West Africa. She thought he was talking about a United Nations Peace Keeping operation! Taken by surprise, he laughed and thanked her for the alternative biography she had bestowed on him. Then he told her about Peace Corps. The incident was what initially inspired him to compile this collection Letters from Ghana 1968-1970: A Peace Corps Chronicle A combination of historical forces in the 1960s induced tens of thousands of (mainly) young U.S. volunteers to live in countries other than their own and engage in humanitarian activities. The body of letters that resulted from this great Peace Corps diaspora is a rich yet neglected legacy. From August 1968 to June 1970, Thiem was a Peace Corps Volunteer in a village in the . . .

Bubba: The African Adventures of James Johnson by William G. Spain (Malawi 1966–68) ZIWA Books $25.00 (paperback) 400 pages 2013 Reviewed by Walter Morris Baker, Ph.D. (Ethiopia 1966-68) Reading novels for pleasure is not a usual practice for me. Since leaving Peace Corps service almost fifty years ago, my reading has been primarily directed toward reading professional articles and books related to my career as a Psychologist and government regulations related to other occupational activities. For that reason, my reading is usually conducted very slowly in search of details and nuances. With that in mind, I accepted the task of reading Bubba: A Novel for the purpose of writing a review. “This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.” It is a . . .

The Book of Important Moments By Richard Wiley (Korea 1967-69) Dzanc Books $14.95 (paperback) 256 pages 2013 Reviewed by Joanna Luloff (Sri Lanka 1996-98) One of Richard Wiley’s haunted and haunting characters in his latest novel The Book of Important Moments contemplates a jigsaw puzzle of Africa toward the end of the narrative. Babatunde reflects on his new landlady’s eyes, describing them as “slightly rheumy, and one had a visible cataract in it, long and vertical and milky, like the map of Nigeria’s neighbor, called Dahomey, in his long lost Africa jigsaw puzzle. He had loved that puzzle more than anything.” Babatunde, himself, is not unlike a jagged puzzle, a man of many bewildering parts who only becomes fully visible by novel’s end. One can take the metaphor even further, too, and read Wiley’s novel as a jigsaw puzzle of discrete pieces that travels between Lagos, Nigeria and Tacoma Washington . . .

Dr. Jon Thiem has lived in Colorado for the last 35 years. He is professor emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Colorado State University. It was through his Peace Corps service that he discovered his vocation as a teacher, translator, and scholar of literature. His numerous publications include Lorenzo de’ Medici: Selected Poems and Prose (1991) and Rabbit Creek Country: Three Ranching Lives in the Heart of the Mountain West (2008), written in collaboration with his colleague Deborah Dimon. Rabbit Creek Country was a Finalist for the Colorado Book Award in 2009. Several years back he mentioned to a young woman (with a Ph.D.) that in the late 1960s he had served with the Peace Corps in Ghana, West Africa. She thought he was referring to a United Nations Peace Keeping operation! The incident inspired him to compile this collection of letters. The body of letters are from August . . .

Here is what might work for you as a writer, as it has worked for Robert Hamilton (Ethiopia 1964-66). He has published his second e-book, Short and Shorter: Short Stories and Poetry, for $0.99 and it is for sale now on Amazon.com. Robert wrote about his new book: “The short stories and poetry, written over a 35-year period, include characters involved in international arms trading, a wife forced to choose between a philandering deceased husband and her son, a husband who has fallen in love with his wife, the fate of heaven when its computers fail, a creative and ambitious stock broker who takes a bold step to break out of “the bull pen,” three generations of friends harboring secrets, an aspiring teenage writer exploring life on a long bus trip, the unfulfilled ambitions of a would-be scholar, an almost love affair between the brilliant pianist and the talented viola . . .

What The Zhang Boys Know has won the Library of Virginia Award in Fiction. The Library of Virginia is pleased to announce the he winners of the 16th Annual Library of Virginia Literary Awards, sponsored by Dominion. Th e October 19 awards celebration was hosted by award -winning Virginia author David Baldacci. Awards categories were fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and literary lifetime achievement. Clifford Gartstang (Korea 1976-7) won for What the Zhang Boys Know which the judges felt was a seamless tale of an immigrant seeking a new wife and mother for his sons. The novel is an enticing collection of interconnected stories about characters who live in a condominium in Washington, D.C. What the Zhang Boys Know, a novel in stories: Set in a condominium building on the edge of Chinatown in Washington, D.C., these stories present the struggle of Zhang Feng-qi, originally from Shanghai, to find a new mother . . .

The Buried Excavating the Egyptian Revolution. by Peter Hessler The New Yorker, November 18, 2013 From Cairo, it’s only about three hundred miles to Abydos, in Upper Egypt, but the distance feels much greater. This region has been a world apart ever since Pharaonic times. The ancient Egyptians separated their land into Upper and Lower, a division that confuses moderns who orient themselves by the compass rather than by the Nile. Upper Egypt lies to the south, where the river has carved a deep gorge into the North African plateau. At Abydos, the gorge is about fifteen miles wide, flanked on both sides by high cliffs that are the color of sand. There’s no rain to speak of, and the surrounding desert is absolute: from the air, the narrow corridor of green along the Nile appears hopelessly isolated. Head due west and the next river you cross is in South . . .

The Ravenala by Jackie Zollo Brooks (Madagascar 1997-99) A Peace Corps Writers Book $16.00 (paperback) 286 pages 2013 Review by Leita Kaldi Davis (Senegal 1993-96) The Ravenala is a palm tree found in Madagascar, whose fanning branches point east and west, so it is also called the “travelers’ tree.” It serves as a metaphor for the novel, especially its main character, Vivian, who seeks direction and freedom as a Peace Corps Volunteer in her early sixties. The Malagasy people who are her English students, and those who work for her domestically teach her lessons in humility, goodness and courage. When her gas stove blows up in the face of Merlah, her warrior guard, she takes care of him, treating his burns, and realizes how deeply she cares about him, his family and the brave island people. Vivian walks past prisoners of a crumbling fort who are free to go have . . .

Roland Merullo (Micronesia 1979-80) has written thirteen books, including Golfing with God and Revere Beach Boulevard. He has a novel coming out this December from Crown. It is entitled Vatican Waltz. This is a Catholic novel in the sense it is about a woman who believes she is called by God to be the first female Catholic priest. In the course of the novel, the woman, Cynthia Clare Piantedosi, reaches out to other unreceptive officials within the Catholic establishment and is met with ridicule. (Hello? Being Catholic, I could have told the protagonist that.) Unable to tune out the divine messages, she leaves behind all that she knows, letting the power of her unswerving faith drive her all the way to the Vatican in pursuit of a destiny she doesn’t full understand. (Well, perhaps Pope Francis will be more understanding.) The book has already received positive reviews from the Chicago . . .

[By Heart is a series on the Atlantic Blog edited by Joe Fassler in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. Here is the last by Fassler and Shacochis. Joe Fassler: Is a writer obligated to address the way that powerful institutions affect how we live and what we feel? Or is it enough to conjure life on the scale of garden, bed, and kitchen table? Bob Shacochis, author of The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, is more qualified than most to answer these questions, to sort out the relationship between what he calls “the literature of political experience” versus “the literature of domestic experience.” For years, he wrote the “Dining In” column for GQ-short, wistful celebrations of the meals prepared and shared with a beloved woman. (He collected these essays, which include recipes, in a book aptly titled Domesticity.) But Shacochis’s fiction, and his globe-trotting work as a . . .

Omnivoracious by Neal Thompson on November 04, 2013 Over drinks at Seattle’s Brave Horse Tavern, Shacochis described his encounter in Haiti years ago with the “haunting” and “unpleasant” woman who became the inspiration for the main character in his new novel, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, which was an Amazon Best Book of the Month pick in September. The National Book Award-winning author met the woman–“blonde, young, infuriating,” as he calls her in the opening line of the book–while covering the US occupation of Haiti for Harper’s Magazine. She claimed to be a photojournalist and asked Shacochis to give her a tour of a voodoo temple; during the drive there, she said she’d lost her soul. “I knew her for less than 36 hours, and I forgot her name within days,” he said. “But what happened in that temple disturbed me so much it haunted me for five years. “I just never . . .

JFK’s Last Hundred Days The Transformation of a Man and The Emergence of a Great President by Thurston Clarke (Tunisia 1968) The Penguin Press, New York 415 pages August 2013 $29.95 Reviewed by Bonnie Lee Black (Gabon 1996-98) “That’s the trouble with all you historians!” JFK railed at his aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who had praised FDR effusively in his New Deal trilogy. “You made all those New Dealers seven feet tall. They weren’t that good. They were just a bunch of guys like us.”                                                                                                                         — JFK’s Last Hundred Days In this his newest book, Thurston Clarke focuses on the three months leading up to John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s assassination at the age of 46, fifty years ago this month. Clarke, author of eleven widely acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, paints an honest portrait of the fascinating, complex, and elusive man who served less than two years of his . . .

In 1992, The Peace Corps Experience Award was initiated. It is presented annually to a Peace Corps Volunteer or staff member, past or present for the best short description of life in the Peace Corps. It can be a personal essay, story, poem, letter, cartoon or song. The subject matter can be any aspect of the Peace Corps experience – daily life, assignment, travel, host country nationals, other Volunteers, readjustment. In 1997, this award was renamed to honor Moritz Thomsen (Ecuador 1965-67) whose Living Poor has been widely cited as an outstanding telling of the essence of the Peace Corps experience. • Sarge Shriver often said that the real benefit from the Peace Corps experience would be the children of RPCVs who would raise their children with a better understanding and compassion for world problems because of having had the Peace Corps experience. Briefly in the early ’70s, the Peace Corps . . .